Move to renewable energy to power IT

What big tech trends do you believe are changing the wo

What is your current role and day to day responsibilities?

My name is Seamus Dunne and I’m the Managing Director for the Irish business of Digital Realty, which is a global provider of Data Centre co-location and connectivity services. I spend my time with our current and new customers, who range from large global cloud service providers to multinational and local Irish enterprises across verticals from telecoms, financial services, automotive, gaming, retail and more.

What is your professional background?

I had a long career in Hewlett Packard and most recently ran their global IT technology services business while based in Houston Texas. I subsequently became the CEO of a 3D printing company before taking this role in Ireland with Digital Realty

What are some of the biggest challenges you are facing in the current IT landscape?

The fact that the compelling and urgent need for enterprise IT to transform its operating model is being held up by skills shortages, fear and risk with implementation, budgets and time to value concerns. IT needs to deliver better and faster services to the business in order to drive growth, innovation and competitiveness.

What are your thoughts on digital transformation?

I believe digital transformation is in fact industry transformation. Digital methods and digital technologies will drive innovation and growth for all businesses and organisations for the next decade. Data, AI, a fully digitised and intelligent stack (sales, marketing, supply chain, finance, support, R&D…) will be a key focus for virtually every industry (automotive, finance, farming, pharma…). Remote collaboration and digital tools will drive R&D and the “Moore’s Law” of innovation for the next decade.

What are your thoughts on how sustainability can be addressed from an IT perspective?

IT infrastructure has done a good job improving the energy efficiency and utilisation across compute, network and storage products and modern data centers are designed to be very efficient. However, the next step has to be the move to renewable energy and away from heavy fossil fuels to power IT.

What big tech trends do you believe are changing the world?

The big tech trends to me are:1. Renewable and alternative energy solutions. 2. AI and augmented reality 3. Next gen internet (smarter devices, computing power and network advancement). 4. Genomics

Where do you see your role in 5 years time?

Managing connected hubs for disparate IT deployments, broking IT services across these deployments and between connected communities of interest through these hub, from the edge to various clouds.

Seamus Dunne is speaking at The Business Post’s 2022 CIO & IT Leaders Summit on June 28th in Croke Park. Visit www.ciosummit.ie for full details and bookings.